It's Saturday night at sea, ten o'clock. Shauna is asleep, off-watch, down below, and John is up in the cockpit with a laptop tapping away at a sailblog entry. We left Noumea on Tuesday morning, along with David and Melinda on "Sassoon". They are also returning to Australia, but are making for Gladstone to do some work on the boat before coming south. We did a pretty reasonable job of timing with this passage - we are riding over the top of a high pressure system and haven't had any troubles other than having to sail close-hauled for about 24 hours. And the flying fish!!! Anyone who has been following the blog will remember that about this neck of the woods on our way over to the islands in May we were boarded by an inordinate number of flying fish, one of whom inserted himself about a metre down our scupper drain and we couldn't remove him until we reached New Caledonia some days later, by which time he was fully ripened. Well the flying fish have had us in their sights again - a large boarding party had to be removed from the side decks last night. John, the night before that, had one of the wet, smelly, oily little critters fly into the back of his neck as he sat quietly dozing while on watch. Some wake-up call. The message is that the flying fish of the Coral Sea are not to be trusted. Oh, and the other problem is that we have vast quantities of that beautiful Vanuatu beef in the freezer which will certainly be confiscated by Customs on return to Australia - so we are gamely trying to eat our way through it all over the next few days - rump for breakfast, rissoles for lunch, beef curry for dinner..... Tonight there will be a moon, in the last quarter at present, but it isn't rising until 2300. Meanwhile there is nothing to dim the stars - out here with no background light sources, one sees a REAL Milky Way - a seemingly solid mass of trillions of stars, and down at the southern edge of all that the Southern Cross lies lazily on its side, with the two Pointers appearing to show the way home should the GPS fail (the sextant is rusty from neglect). Every now and then a little cluster of shooting stars burn up in a spectacular show. We spoke on the HF radio earlier this evening to Sassoon, Waterwynch and Muscat - all four of us are under way tonight and are separated by hundreds of miles of water, but all reported good sailing conditions, and all reported being convinced that this is the life! The next blog entry may well be from not too far from Oz. Cheers from us.